Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Is Arrogance Now Spelled "GOOGLE"?

According to Mary Jo Foley, Google may be the new king of arrogance, dethroning the humbler, if not gentler, Microsoft.

I've worried about Google's arrogance for a while and I took their purchase of YouTube as a smack that Google video was unable to compete. But they don't seemed to have learned much from that.

MS still has a long way to go but the Microsoft folks have been humbled and fought back before. Plus, Microsoft has the Cash, not just market valuation to hang in for the long haul. Think Word vs Word Perfect, Excel, vs Lotus, dbase vs Access, Outlook vs Notes, SQL Sever vs Oracle and MySQL, IE vs Netscape, now IE vs Firefox. Sometimes, it just takes so long to win that nobody notices or the market moves on. (Windows Mobile vs Palm anyone?)

I worry when Google keeps talking about smart, smart, smart. Smart is good, but it's not everything. Google's perpetual betas seem to indicate an execution problem for example. Also, from the article, a 200 person peer review is used before coding takes place. That would seem to make it tougher for a really good rogue idea to sneak out, like, oh, say the IBM PC did.